If you were twelve at any point during the 80s, chances are that you had a bike, a video store membership card, a couple of bucks in your pocket, and the general understanding that if you weren’t back by dark, someone would eventually get around to noticing. Or not.
You saw this reflected in the movies of the era like Goonies and ET, and usually, the adults were either absent, oblivious, or in the way – and the kids had to sort things out for themselves. And by the end credits, the kids figured out that their parents’ limitations didn’t have to be theirs.
So why isn’t Russkies sitting on your shelf between Goonies and Stand By Me? Because it absolutely should.
For the uninitiated, a Soviet sailor washes ashore in Key West after a surveillance operation capsizes, and three twelve-year-old military brats, armed with Sgt. Slammer comics and a clubhouse, find him. Their first instinct, soaked in years of prime-time Cold War programming, is that this must be the opening move of an invasion. But it doesn’t take long for the sailor, who is scared and a long way from home, to befriend the kids. The actual threat is a hardline Soviet intelligence officer trying to drag Mischa the sailor back to the ship, and an American military officer who’d rather engineer an international incident than let three kids walk a Russian to safety. Both institutions are presented as the problem, while the kids and the sailor fight both fronts. It stars Whip Hubley, Leaf Phoenix (but you can call him Joaquin) as Danny, Stefan DeSalle and Peter Billingsley – and it’s directed by Rick Rosenthal of Halloween II fame and Bad Boys. The 1983 one.
You’d think all of this national self-reflection and good will towards the soviet people would go down well in 1987. You’d think wrong, obviously. What are you, a commie?
For decades in North America, the grainy mental image of those who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain had been assembled from stories of long toilet paper lines, Levis jeans that cost a fortune, and the implicit suggestion that anyone living under that system either suffered for it or had it coming.
They were Communists, a word used like a character flaw, as if all those people were complicitly un-American, as if they hadn’t just gone along with the only system being force-fed to them. Like Yakov Smirnoff, the defectors who reached our shores were the good’uns, and their re-humanisation was conditional on their explicit endorsement of the American way and their allegiance to that sweet sweet capitalism.
Meanwhile Gorbachev was already in the Kremlin pushing glasnost from within, he began moving the Soviet Union away from traditional hardline communism shortly after taking power in 1985, with his reforms accelerating significantly between 1986 and 1988. All the while, he was used as a political boogeyman, and the butt of jokes in the Naked Gun movies. Gorbachev went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Not Bush.
But this is still 1987, and movies like Rambo 2 and Red Dawn had done efficient work keeping the Soviet leadership abstract for audiences. By abstract I mean evil. So, the film pulled in a paltry 2.19 million across 604 screens before reaching home video through Lorimar within months. Rosenthal had originally planned a July 4th release, since the film is set over the Fourth of July weekend and the timing would have been almost too perfect, but the production company bounced it through several changes before settling on November, and the movie opened opposite Fatal Attraction. It didn’t stand a chance.
Some of it was the bad timing, but the movie required a receptiveness that the decades of cold war had made difficult. Inherited prejudice is the worst kind because it doesn’t render as prejudice: it’s ambient, it’s in everything, and it gets you before you can question it. You don’t remember learning that Soviets were the enemy any more than you remember learning what the word enemy means. It’s just background radiation. And ninety-nine minutes of PG family adventure wasn’t going to fix anything.
The Berlin Wall came down two years after Russkies opened in theaters, and the 80s Cold War films became relics overnight in 1990. The ones with enough muscle got to be emblematic of their era. The rest like Spies Like Us, The Experts and Russkies, slid to the bottom of the shelf and stayed there, because the thing they responded to had been declared over, some even considered the cold war won, and everyone wanted to move on. There were deserts to storm, but more importantly, the 90’s were too busy preparing for the tech revolution and there was this whole new millennium to colonise. I think we were all ready to wake up from history and walk into a brighter future.
And then September 2001 reset the clock. Sure, it was a different enemy ideology, but it repurposed the same paranoia machinery: the ambient fear, the abstraction of a people into a threat both internal and external, and more importantly, the suggestion that understanding them was the same as endorsing them. The boogeyman changed and nobody had to acknowledge that the old one had been mostly an outdated management tool anyway.
What makes it strange now is watching Russia come back around, not as the old commie threat but as something that certain opportunists have decided they can work with, admire even, because the strongman model pretty much guarantees conflicts. Both internal and external. Home and abroad. It’s us, vs them. Only instead them of being over there, they’re over here. Conflicts guarantee distractions. And not having distractions and reasons to funnel billions just means there are more eyes on our leaders to fix actual real-world issues effecting real people. Those who spent the better part of fifty years warning the loudest about Soviet authoritarian aggression, well turns out authoritarianism wasn’t really the sticking point. The ideologically driven fear mongering was disposable. Conflicts just need to happen, and the people in charge don’t care why, as long as the polling numbers work in their favour.
So, what was all of that for? We spent half the twentieth century being warned about the dangers of an idea, and turns out the idea was mostly a convenient decoy to mobilise a sense of nationalism. Sure, the red scare gets brought up again here and there, for old time’s sake. Nothing says nostalgia like a bit of red baiting from time to time when a pundit needs us old farts to get in line. But a lot of us could see this exhausted performance, even then.
The film makers must have thought this was obvious in 1987, and had three twelve-year-olds in a Florida figure out in an afternoon what the adults had apparently never bothered to try.
-Pop
Russkies arrived on home video this week in 1988, after a November 6, 1987 theatrical release.